The Kreutzer Sonata, by Leo Tolstoy

Chapter XVIII.

“So we lived in the city. In the city the wretched feel less sad. One can live there a hundred years without being
noticed, and be dead a long time before anybody will notice it. People have no time to inquire into your life. All are
absorbed. Business, social relations, art, the health of children, their education. And there are visits that must be
received and made; it is necessary to see this one, it is necessary to hear that one or the other one. In the city
there are always one, two, or three celebrities that it is indispensable that one should visit.

Now one must care for himself, or care for such or such a little one, now it is the professor, the private tutor,
the governesses, . . . and life is absolutely empty. In this activity we were less conscious of the
sufferings of our cohabitation. Moreover, in the first of it, we had a superb occupation — the arrangement of the new
dwelling, and then, too, the moving from the city to the country, and from the country to the city.

“Thus we spent a winter. The following winter an incident happened to us which passed unnoticed, but which was the
fundamental cause of all that happened later. My wife was suffering, and the rascals (the doctors) would not permit her
to conceive a child, and taught her how to avoid it. I was profoundly disgusted. I struggled vainly against it, but she
insisted frivolously and obstinately, and I surrendered. The last justification of our life as wretches was thereby
suppressed, and life became baser than ever.

“The peasant and the workingman need children, and hence their conjugal relations have a justification. But we, when
we have a few children, have no need of any more. They make a superfluous confusion of expenses and joint heirs, and
are an embarrassment. Consequently we have no excuses for our existence as wretches, but we are so deeply degraded that
we do not see the necessity of a justification. The majority of people in contemporary society give themselves up to
this debauchery without the slightest remorse. We have no conscience left, except, so to speak, the conscience of
public opinion and of the criminal code. But in this matter neither of these consciences is struck. There is not a
being in society who blushes at it. Each one practices it — X, Y, Z, etc. What is the use of multiplying beggars, and
depriving ourselves of the joys of social life? There is no necessity of having conscience before the criminal code, or
of fearing it: low girls, soldiers’ wives who throw their children into ponds or wells, these certainly must be put in
prison. But with us the suppression is effected opportunely and properly.

“Thus we passed two years more. The method prescribed by the rascals had evidently succeeded. My wife had grown
stouter and handsomer. It was the beauty of the end of summer. She felt it, and paid much attention to her person. She
had acquired that provoking beauty that stirs men. She was in all the brilliancy of the wife of thirty years, who
conceives no children, eats heartily, and is excited. The very sight of her was enough to frighten one. She was like a
spirited carriage-horse that has long been idle, and suddenly finds itself without a bridle. As for my wife, she had no
bridle, as for that matter, ninety-nine hundredths of our women have none.”